An exhibition on Cézanne's finished and unfinished works opened on January 27th 2000 at the Bank of Austria Kunstforum in Vienna before going to Zurich next May. Some 300,000 visitors are expected to attend this exhibition devoted to the great pioneer of modern painting and especially about the last 20 years of his career.
Cézanne's main aim was to become a novator. He thus first wanted to make Impressionism durable while trying to go beyond the confines of what was accepted in painting during his lifetime.
When Cézanne died in 1906 his works were already much admired by many avant-garde artists such as Matisse, the Fauves and Picasso.
Eighty paintings and forty-five watercolours are being presented at the Kunstforum and demonstrate that Cézanne's motto "I am searching while painting" was utterly right.
Originating from a rich family, Cézanne inherited his father's wealth in 1886 and had enough means to pursue his experimentations. Contrary to contemporary trends, which called for paintings to be totally covered with colours, he painted works with blank spaces. His detractors claim they were the results of his inability to reach what he wanted to achieve whereas his admirers pretend that these blanks had a clear meaning and that their autonomy paved the way to modern painting.
Some works showing these blanks, such as the portrait of his wife loaned by the museum of Boston or that of Ambroise Vollard and again a view of a forest (1902-1904) loaned by the museum of Ottawa deeply reveal Cézanne's sense for research and the new vision he adopted during the last ten years of his life such as in the Blue Landscape of 1904 and in certain of his views of the Montagne Sainte Victoire.
Cézanne was no longer satisfied with the representation of reality and these blanks were finally like a confession of his inability to find new solutions despite the fact that colouring sensations reproducing light led to abstraction as he once said. Cézanne also added that these coloured patches could not cover all the canvas nor enable him to fix objects when contact points were so delicate, so tenuous.
It was Cézanne who invented the word "abstraction" but he somewhat failed to go beyond what he had achieved as this exhibition, due to last until April 25th, tends to demonstrates.
Still he was the first to find the key that would open the door to Cubism shortly after his death. Some people would ask why he did not manage turn his back completely to classical painting but the answer appears quite simple as he was a man of the 19th Century who first tried to become a classical painter before fighting a long battle to diverge from academic painting facing the risk of being laughed at by his contemporaries. The Impressionists were his companions at the start but eventually yielded to comfort when they became fashionable at the turn of the 20th Century thus leaving him alone in his quest for a new form of painting. Becoming lonely he no longer had the means to impose his new vision probably for fear of being considered as mad. One should understand that going against academic trends was like committing suicide during the 19th Century. Van Gogh did not resist the pressure while Gustave Moreau, a celebrated teacher and a master of Symbolism and Fantasy also came near abstraction but kept his experimentations secret.
Modern painting in fact needed new blood and Matisse, who left the studio of the deeply academic Bouguereau, whom Cézanne once thought as having as teacher, went on to pursue his studies with the much liberal Moreau. One should therefore understand that the strong dictatorship imposed by many teachers throughout the second half of the 19th Century prevented many of their pupils from trying to go against their teachings.
Thanks to Moreau, Matisse's career blossomed in a different way while Picasso started painting as a child and had the opportunity of escaping the Spanish academic world when he went to work alone in Paris at 20. Thanks to Cézanne, these painters and many other artists, notably those who belonged to the Nabi and Fauve movements, then felt free to develop new forms of painting using his late works as a useful springboard to achieve what he had surely dreamed of.
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